The need to accurately position—and reposition as a new application may require—one or more items for proper operation of systems and apparatus has been known in several industries for years. Equally familiar to designers of such systems are the consequences of physical impacts (whether abrupt or otherwise) with positioned components (or, more generally, components that are capable of receiving an impact force) such as bottle conveyance system side guides and the disturbance to the desired position of that component (and perhaps to the items such as bottles that they position) that they cause. Embodiments of the inventive technology disclosed herein seek to minimize such consequences, preferably in a less expensive but still reliable manner as compared with conventional techniques.
Perhaps the most well known such position control apparatus is a side guide position control apparatus, which may find application in the bottling industry to maintain proper position of containers (bottles or cans, as but two examples) as they travel along a conveyor during processing (filling, capping, etc.). A similar type of position control apparatus may operate as part of a palletizing system to maintain the proper position of pallets as they travel along a conveyor, whether for pallet manufacture or pallet loading. Position control apparatus may also find application as part of a differential valve controller, an HVAC mixing control system (as a substitute for expensive blowers) and a programmable vehicle suspension system (where ground clearance is controlled), as but three of many examples. Indeed, the position control apparatus may be used to control the position of components of a system, where such components may benefit from repeated monitoring and adjustment to assure proper positioning (e.g., during a single “run” on a single bottle size) and/or, particularly in systems that are usable to process differently sized items (e.g., bottles of different sizes), where components need to have their position adjusted before a specific “run” (e.g., on a different bottle size), depending on the size of an item processed during that “run.”
However, whether it be a mis-oriented bottle on a conveyor that impacts a side guide, a human jumping on a conveyor belt, a gust of wind on a solar panel, or any of the myriad ways in which an impulse force can be applied to a positioned component (such as a positioner that itself positions items), such positioned components are vulnerable to impulse forces that can cause significant deviation from their intended position, whether for a short period of time or for longer periods of time, and can compromise system operation, efficiency, operational safety, operational success, etc.
Conventional ways of mitigating this problem, e.g., increasing internal pressure of pressurized systems and/or increasing size of cylinder bores in piston-based systems, while perhaps successful in adding some rigidity to positioned components in response to impulse forces, also may be expensive, perhaps prohibitively so. Particular embodiments of the inventive technology seek to improve mitigation of effects of the impulse force by, e.g., improving the rigidity of the component when it receives the impulse, and/or reduce costs (as compared with conventional systems) associated with providing sufficient rigidity in response to the force. Indeed, there have been attempts in the past to provide adequate rigidity in response to impulses by, e.g., increasing internal pressure of the internally pressurized system with a compressor, but such efforts may be prohibitively costly and/or simply do not afford all the benefits afforded by the inventive technology.